Behaviors in Adolescents after Playing Violent Video Games - Essay Example

A Review of Wei (2007) Video games have increased dramatically in popularity since the introduction of the first basic programs in the early 1970s with pong. In the past four decades, the rise of internet and gaming console users has kept up with advances in the realism and violence of the games themselves. Innovation and technological development around the video games may have started chiefly in the United States, but demand in China is immense. Among those video games being played, Wei (2007) cites a statistics that 64% of games rated “E” for “everyone” contain some kind of intentional violence, either an act causing injury or death to another character, and games rated in more violent categories obviously contain even more graphic or problematic images. In light of these developments, Wei (2007) set out to systematically study the attitudinal and behavioral effects of playing violent video games among China’s 200 million adolescents, and whether gender plays a moderating role in these effects. Ultimately, the author detects negative effects of exposure to violence in video games, including greater tolerance of violence, lower empathetic attitudes, and higher levels of aggression. Wei (2007) puts forward four hypotheses, the first (H1) being that Chinese adolescents who have a higher exposure to violence in video games will be more attitudinally supportive of violence and, in the second hypothesis (H2), those same adolescents who have a higher exposure will be less attitudinally concerned with others. Behaviorally, according to the third hypothesis (H3), those adolescents with higher exposure to violent video games, will exhibit higher levels of aggressive behavior. Fourth (H4), with respect to measuring gender differences, male adolescents will spend more time playing video games and fifth (H5), generally have a higher level of exposure to video game violence than female adolescents. The author of the study sought to evaluate the validity of these hypotheses using a purposive sample and a scaled measure of attitudes and behaviors. Wei (2007) studies the effects of video games in China because systematic studies of this kind had not been conducted in Asian cultures and because it adds to the growing global literature on the subject by generalizing the effects of video games to other cultures, rather than looking exclusively within the United States. The participants in the study come from a city of 1 million people in central China and are frequent users of internet cafes, where video game playing is most common (due to a lack of penetration of console games and internet at home). Two-thirds of the sample were male and one-third were female, and of that sample, most participants were in high school (the age range was from 11 to 22). A total of 312 responses were collected during a 2-week time frame in the summer of 2005. The materials Wei (2007) use to collect data were based on a questionnaire format with questions requiring scaled answers. The first scale dealt with how often or what access participants had to playing video games, which led to the second scale asking which video games participants had played. Each video game had been previously rated on its violent content using an index score. The next scale gauged participants’ attitudes toward violence and the last scale evaluated attitudes toward others and whether the participant is generally aggressive. The survey was administered to participants at internet cafes, who were approached by college students. Participants who had played video games at least once were informed that data collection was voluntary and anonymous. Following the collection of data from questionnaires, the author provides descriptive statistics regarding the demographics of the sample collected, including the fact that roughly half of the sample owned home computers and had an internet connection at home. Also, the median length of playing video games was roughly 1 to 2 years, with a mean playing time per sitting between 3 and 4 hours. To evaluate the validity of the hypotheses discussed in the beginning, the author conducted bivariate and multivariate analyses to examine the effects of violence in games. First looking at H1, the author reports that the null hypothesis was rejected, with an r value of 0.18 and a p-value of < 0.01. In other words, there was roughly a 0.18 correlation between exposure to violent video games and pro-attitudes toward violence. Another way to frame this result is in terms of coefficient of determination (or R squared) by saying that roughly 3.2% of the variation in pro-attitudes toward violence can be explained in terms of exposure to violent video games in the sample. With regard to H1, Wei (2007) found a significant, negative correlation between exposure to violent video games and empathetic attitudes (r = -0.30, p < 0.001), which means that the two are inversely related, predicting that those who play violent video games more often will likely be less empathetic with those who are the victims of violence or be less empathetic when contemplating committing violence. The third hypothesis, H3, predicted adolescents with higher exposure to violent video games will exhibit higher levels of aggressive behavior, as measured by their responses to scaled questions asking participants to respond to hypothetical situations such as “Somebody picks a fight with you on the way home from school.” Participants were asked to pick “fight”, “yell at them”, or “just let it go” as potential responses to the situation. In the end, the study found that a higher level of exposure to violence in video games led to significantly higher levels of aggressive behavioral tendencies (r = 0.32, p < 0.01). Each of the measures in questions (pro-violence attitudes, anti-empathetic attitudes, and aggressive behaviors) were linked significantly also to time spent using computers and time spent playing online video games. Using those two predictors, one can explain 7.6% of the variance (as a result of the adjusted R2 value). As a result, Wei (2007) concludes that these results add to a growing literature that generally supports a link between exposure to videogame violence and the tolerance of violence in society among Chinese adolescents who play them as well as increases in aggressive behavior within that group. Wei (2007) reserves the fourth hypothesis, H4, for final analysis. That hypothesis proposed a relationship between gender and the variables in question, and to evaluate H4 the author used a T-test measure. In the table replicated in Appendix 1, the author shows the effect of gender on exposure to video game violence. Ultimately, the mean score for exposure to violence in video games was 11.36 and 4.30 for males and females respectively, which represents a statistically significant discrepancies between the two sets of data. In addition, males reported a longer history of playing video games on the internet as well as a higher frequency of playing games. However, while the author has demonstrated males play video games more often and therefore are exposed to violence more often, the author still needs to prove the validity of H5, which proposed that there is a relationship between the attitudinal and behavioral effects of playing video games and gender such that male adolescents will exhibit those attitudes and behaviors more because of their greater exposure. In the same table in Appendix 1, Wei (2007) shows the results of a correlation test in which the male sample’s scores were significantly correlated with attitudes to violence and aggression, with no significant result for the female sample on the same correlative measures. Putting it all together, the author concludes that playing online video games is linked to pro-violence attitudes, less empathy, and more aggression among male adolescents in the sample. Wei (2007) found support for all of the hypotheses proposing relationships between violence in video games and anti-social attitudes and behaviors. The author notes that this research supports similar findings from studies in Britain, Japan, Korea, and the United States where video game usage is also fairly common. Wei (2007) summarizes the similarities between this study in China and results from other countries in the table replicated in Appendix 2. The author believes that one can predict to some degree future trends in Chinese society based on the emerging market for violent video games within the country and based on results from this kind of research in other countries where those markets are already well-established. Wei (2007) seeks to establish a theoretical framework to understand the results of the study in the article’s Discussion section by drawing upon desensitization theory, which proposes that repeated exposure to mediated (e.g. cartoon or video game) violence reduces children’s sensitivity to violent conduct. In other words, the more often and the more routine that violence seems to a young mind, the more that child will engage in or accept the existence of violent behavior in society. Wei (2007) notes that the effects of exposure to video game violence on aggression are indirect, which leads to a future direction for studies on this subject studying the direct relationship between video game violence on the hierarchies of cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses. Going beyond looking at correlational statistics derived from responses to surveys given to a non-random sample, future research might focus on neurological models (such as looking at the relationship between known centers of the brain that respond to violence and those that respond to video games) or longitudinal research designs that follow children who play violent video games and their long-term well-being, controlling for other factors of course. The author suggests these kinds of studies as a way of extending this study; one might see this study as support for the need for further, more in-depth studies of the relationship between these variables within Chinese society and in other parts of the world. All in all, Wei (2007) is an important article in looking at the relationship between violent video games and aggressive behavior/anti-social attitudes. While it is limited in scope and in external generalizability, the study adds to a growing set of psychological and sociological research demonstrating the potentially harmful effects of allowing young people across cultures to engage in mediated violence through the act of playing a video game. Although we need to wait for long-term trends to emerge and to be studied, societies such as China and the United States should be conscious of how such activity are affecting the long-term mental health and well-being of adolescents. Appendix 1 Appendix 2 References Wei, R. (2007). Effects of Playing Violent Videogames on Chinese Adolescents’ Pro-Violence Attitudes, Attitudes Toward Others, and Aggressive Behavior. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 10(3), 371-380. doi:10.1089/cpb.2006.9942 Read More